In her first interview with MSP Success, newly appointed Kaseya CEO Rania Succar opens up about her bold vision for the company’s next chapter—and what it means for MSPs. With a background in leading high-growth teams at Intuit Mailchimp, Google, and McKinsey, Succar brings a fresh yet focused leadership style rooted in customer outcomes, platform innovation, and partnership.
In this candid Q&A, Succar shares her leadership philosophy, outlines the priorities driving her first year at Kaseya, and discusses how she plans to build on the company’s platform momentum while putting MSPs—big and small—at the center of everything. This interview has been edited for length.
MSP Success: First of all, welcome to the channel! You bring a deep understanding of the needs of small and medium businesses, and you have a track record of leading innovation and integration at Intuit Mailchimp. So for those who were surprised that Kaseya chose a CEO from outside the channel, how will that skill set help you lead the company during its next phase of growth?
Rania Succar: One is customer centricity. Everything we do will be measured, based on how much we’re improving the profitability of the MSPs we serve and their revenue growth as well as the end customers that MSPs serve, making sure they’re successful. Secondly, a focus on innovation. We will be taking advantage of the best that AI brings to bear. That will be very important to fueling MSP success. Customer centricity and focus on innovation—those are things that I bring that will be very important to the next chapter. That’s why I believe that my appointment makes sense for the company’s future.
MSP Success: You’re no stranger to stepping in after high-profile CEOs transition away from their roles, first at Mailchimp with co-founder Ben Chestnut, and now with Fred Voccola. What are both the challenges and opportunities of being in that position?
Succar: I see it as opportunities. I really deeply appreciate what Fred did over the last 10 years. It’s very impressive to see where he got Kaseya to. In both cases, I had the opportunity and fortune to build on top of what exceptional leaders did to get us here, and I’ll be able to complement it with a different outlook and different set of experiences to get us to a new outcome.
I am very much a transformational leader and believe you can move organizations very quickly by the way that you lead. And so yes, I want to take Kaseya in new directions in certain areas. I’ve built a leadership playbook over time that allows us to drive change quickly and to get to the new outcome we want.
MSP Success: And speaking of quickly, I’ve read that you like to move fast with impact. What will that look like internally for Kaseya in your first 6 to 12 months?
Succar: It will be working with the very talented leadership team here to first identify the priorities that will matter most to our customers, and where they’ll be able to observe the most impact in the automation they’ve been looking for in their business, so they can improve their profitability in the growth they’ve been trying to capture. We’re starting with the experiences they want to have with Kaseya that are better end-to-end experiences. We’ll prioritize those first, in addition to enabling capabilities that allow us to go faster over time. So, what are the technology investments we can use to strengthen our development platform? What are the enabling capabilities in our culture that allow us to just work faster and better?
Then we’ll go after them in the way that I like to work—with speed. That typically manifests itself in alignment across all functions [with] the same shared goals. It also is very metrics-oriented. If we’re successful, what’s the outcome metric? And how do we measure our success every step of the way? Those are the ways in which we will move faster toward these outcomes.
MSP Success: Kaseya’s messaging to MSP partners over the last few years has been about improving profitability, efficiency, and automation, and reducing tool sprawl, primarily around the Kaseya 365 franchise. Will you continue in that direction and the platform messaging?
Succar: We’ll certainly continue in that direction. We are the leading platform in the industry to help MSPs improve their profit margins and their growth, but we’ll lean into that even more. We’re just getting started. There’s so much incremental value we can deliver there. In addition, we’ll start to become the platform that also works for the most sophisticated MSPs in the industry, because not only are we easy to integrate with, but we offer flexibility for them to build differentiated solutions on top of the platform.
AI will be at the center of all of this. There is so much automation that we can bring to our MSP partners to be more effective in doing their work. That will be central to the value proposition we bring to market.
MSP Success: Some of your competitors lean into more of an open ecosystem. Will Kaseya also continue to give MSPs choice?
Succar: We’ll double down on that. It’s very important to have an open ecosystem where you can plug and play different components. We aspire, and will continue to aspire, to be their operating system—the nerve center of the operation they’re running. But we’d like them to be able to pull all that data and integrate all the other offerings they’re using to be able to get the best benefit for them.
MSP Success: Last year Kaseya rolled out its Partner First Pledge, taking steps toward more flexibility around licensing and pricing and just making it easier to do business with Kaseya. How will you advance that partner-centric culture?
Succar: A few ways. Our teams announced a lot of this at Connect in Las Vegas [at the end of April] even before I started. Our leadership team is very focused on this. They announced the end of high watermark pricing [at Connect], and that received great applause and energy from our customers. We’re working to roll that out.
Second [is] around investing in community, and we talked about how we believe MSPs grow stronger together. We will continue to build programs like TruMethods where we can get MSPs to learn from each other and share best practices. We’ll put out our own thought leadership to help MSPs be even stronger. We’ll put out benchmarking so they can leverage it to figure out how they grow effectively. But that’s very important to us, too. So we’ll continue to strengthen the community.
In Part 2 of this interview, Succar dives deeper into Kaseya’s integration roadmap, potential acquisitions, and how AI and marketing can help MSPs accelerate growth. She also addresses partner concerns head-on—from customer support to community connection—and shares how Kaseya plans to earn greater trust across the channel.
